Understanding the Right of Self-Determination: Historical Context and Modern Implications

The article discusses the principle of self-determination, asserting that each nationality should form its own state, encapsulated in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points from 1918. This principle advocates for justice and equality among nations, emphasizing that governance should be based on the consent of the governed. Historical context includes the Atlantic Charter from 1941, which highlighted the Allies’ commitment to human rights and self-governance, and the incorporation of self-determination into the United Nations Charter.

The article reviews both the merits and criticisms of mono-national states, arguing that a homogenous state can foster unity and stability, as seen in historical examples like the Greek City-State and Republican Rome. However, it also acknowledges the potential pitfalls of mono-nationalism, such as oppression of minority groups and the precarious nature of multinational states.

Critics like Lord Acton argue that multinational states embody the strengths of diverse cultures and promote social advancement. The modern interpretation of self-determination has led to the emergence of new states, creating challenges like international instability and economic nationalism.

Ultimately, the article suggests that while self-determination remains a powerful aspiration for many, a federal approach could help balance unity and diversity, offering a viable solution for managing the complexities of multi-ethnic societies and promoting international peace.

Right of Self-Determination:

This doctrine argues for justice and equality among nations, enabling oppressed nationalities to seek autonomy. While historically linked to anti-colonial movements, self-determination also faces criticism for potentially leading to fragmentation and conflict within multinational states. Advocates argue that it is essential for democracy and freedom, whereas critics warn of its risks, advocating for federal solutions to maintain unity amid diversity. Overall, self-determination remains a powerful aspiration for many seeking national identity and autonomy.

Principle of Self-Determination:

The modem theory is that each nationality should form a separate State, and each State should comprise a single nation. The principle of a mono-national state has lent support to the revolt of nations hitherto held in subjugation and the right of every nationality to become a nation. It stands for President Woodrow Wilson’s right of self-determination of nations and nationalities, enunciated in January 1918 and embodied in his famous Fourteen Points; he declared that an evident principle runs through all the programs.

I have outlined it for you. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they may be strong or weak.

In an address to the United States Congress, he elaborated on the point and said,

Peoples and provinces should not be transferred from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in the game. People may now be dominated and governed only by their consent. Self-determination is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.

President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met on August 14, 1941, somewhere on the Atlantic, and issued an Eight Point Joint Declaration (popularly known as the Atlantic Charter) embodying the objectives for which the Allies were fighting against Germany and explaining the principles that would serve as the basis of the future peace of the world.

The United States and Britain solemnly pledged themselves to uphold the Rights of Man within their own territorial limits and enforce the same throughout the world. It was explicitly stated that neither the United States nor Britain sought territorial or other aggrandisement anywhere in the world and that both countries would respect the rights of the people to choose their forms of government. But the British Prime Minister’s nebulous note added to his subsequent statement in Parliament confined its application “to the States and nations of Europe now under Nazi yoke.

This doctrine of national self-rule was accepted and incorporated in the Charter of the United Nations. Chapter XI of the Charter on the Non-Self-Governing Territories fixed the principle of international accountability for the administering powers of these territories, which would be the progressive development of institutions of self-government. Some eminent thinkers and statesmen had earlier advocated the principle of self-determination.

John Stuart Mill maintained that

wherever the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart.

He regarded it as only a logical application of the right of self-determination. He thought free institutions were next to impossible in a country of different nationalities.

He explained that it is, in general

, a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide with those of nationalities.

James Bryce considered that the right of self-determination symbolized the nationalities’ struggle to realize liberalism and democracy.

Maclver held that the right of self-determination

has prepared the way for our modern democracies since the demand for self-government expands into the demand that the nation govern itself.

Appraisal of the Doctrine:

Numerous advocates of a mononational State claim that a single-nation State is a monument of common history and culture, common traditions and customs, and common symbols and myths. Such a homogeneity of the people fosters fellowship, cooperation, mutual trust, and internal harmony. A cohesive society ensures the promotion and preservation of social heritage, rapid material advancement, and the growth of civilization.

Hegel expounded on the idea of the State as containing all human worth. It was the guardian of the whole moral world because organized moral life was to be found only within the State. To Bosanquet, who Hegel profoundly influenced, the State appeared as a complete idea of realizing human capacity.

Such a state could only be mononational; it is claimed to be the epitome of moral self-sufficiency. History provides innumerable examples of small, independent States that have preciously contributed to the advancement of civilization. The Greek City-State developed to the stage of a conscious effort to realize liberty and equal laws. It was a grand experiment in self-government and the quest for virtue.

The Constitution of the Republican Rome rested on four principles: divided authority, a short tenure of office for magistrates, the final authority of the people on all essential matters, and the military authority of all magistrates was limited. The relevance of these principles is as crucial now as it was then.

A Mononational State is a homogeneous and viable State, and the possibilities of cracking and splitting,” a regular feature of a multinational State,” are remote, if not nonexistent. There is a joint center of loyalty and allegiance: the nation. The mass consciousness of oneness divides people on economic and political issues, not only horizontally but also vertically.

A single unified party or a group of parties, agreeing on fundamentals, man the government and vigorously pursue its policies and programs with the electoral mandate behind them. But suppose the population, as Mill argued, comprises various nationalities. In that case, the government may resort to the policy of ‘divide and rule,’ an old maxim of statecraft, to ensure its stability and the handy weapon to carry out its policies and programs.

If one single nationality happens to command a brute Majority, it may even be ruthless in its policies and attitude towards nationalities in the minority. Mill also argued that the security of a multinational State is always precarious as soldiers drawn from different nationalities lack the common incentive of oneness of interests and purposes.

The right of self-determination and to decide about one’s political future has a democratic basis, international recognition, and collective commitment of nations. It sparked ‘the national consciousness of the peoples yoked to the shackles of the foreign rulers. From the time of the declaration of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, there had been an upsurge first in Europe and then in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, resulting in the ultimate liquidation of the Colonial Empires. The British Empire has become a Commonwealth of Nations within the last five decades. Most of the wealthy Dutch Colonial Empire was lost when Indonesia became independent and a republic. The events in Africa proved a previous phase in the history of the Colonial Empires. Today, just a few stray colonies exist, and the fate of their rulers is as precarious as it was of their predecessors or sin in the network of the defunct Colonial Empire.

Though not many, the critics of the right of self-determination are equally articulate, and their criticism is rather trenchant. They assert that it is historically unsound and sociologically untenable. There are even now many States in which the population is composite, and in all such States, there is maximum freedom for all, and all nationalities are equal participants in the affairs of the State. The notable examples of multinational States are the United States of America, Switzerland, and India.

The Swiss people are not a homogeneous whole. They sharply differ in race, language, religion, and even, to a certain extent, in civilization, yet in this diversity, unity is to be found in the Swiss nation. Switzerland presents to the world the most striking example of a united people and one of the most united and undoubtedly the most patriotic among the peoples of Europe. The United States of America and India are two other examples of unity in diversity.

When the people of a composite State stand on a footing of equality, and the government is just to all, they forget the differences that divide them, and with the passage of time, they become integral parts of a cohesive society.

It is also not entirely true that liberty and free institutions can exist and flourish in a mononational State alone. To cite, again, the example of Switzerland, one feels inclined to agree with Hans Kohn that Switzerland has developed a democratic nationalism similar to the one known in England and the United States, a nationalism made secure and strong by its insistence on individual liberty and on respect for diversity.

Switzerland was the first country in the world to establish republican institutions and the only State in Europe that has always been a republic. When the United States of America was born as an independent nation, Switzerland had behind it a republican tradition of some five hundred years. The impact of Swiss republican institutions was profound on the United States of America, mainly, and other countries adopting the democratic way of life.

The United States of America originally consisted of thirteen Colonies of immigrants drawn from nearly all European countries. Through the gradual process of intermingling different cultures, a new culture, a blend of English and Continental characteristics conditioned by the environments of the New World, was produced.

Together, the new Americans fought their War of Independence and, in the Declaration of Independence adopted on July 4, 1776, announced the birth of a new nation. In the words of Bluntschli, there was a conjunction of various peoples who gave to the latest State of Americans “breadth and variety” that served “as an alloy to give strength and currency to the nobler metal.

The delegates of the thirteen original States, assembled at the Philadelphia Convention in May 1787 to revise the Constitution of the Confederation, adopted entirely a new Constitution, which, according to Gladstone, was “the most beautiful work overstruck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

The new American system of government was based, as James Madison said,

On that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest our political experiments on humanity’s capacity for self-government.

A publication of the United States Information Service gives a matter-of-fact summing-up

The United States is a country of great diversity… Geographically, there is a variety, too… And at the core of this varied land are the people—the most diverse of all, for they stem from countries and social levels worldwide. But despite many differences, certain traditions, freedom, equality, and individual rights are common to all and are taught in the home, church, and schools.

Lord Acton was a relentless critic of the mononational State and the right to self-determination. He believed that a multinational State embodied the genius of all nationalities and consequently was an amalgam of vigor, promise, and advancement.

The combination of different nations in one State, he argued,

It is as necessary a condition of civilized life as the combination of men in society. Inferior races are raised by living in a political union with intellectually superior races. The contact of a younger vitality revives exhausted and decaying nations…. This fertilizing and regenerating process can only be obtained by living under one government. It is in the cauldron of the State that the fusion takes place by which the vigor, knowledge, and capacity of one portion of humanity may be communicated to another.

He believed that a mono-national State is more absurd and more criminal than the theory of Socialism, for society ceases to advance when political and national boundaries coincide.

Acton deprecated the whole doctrine of nationality at the time of its almost unquestioned ascendancy and uttered a solemn warning against the dangers which lurked in it. By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, he wrote in 1862 this principle reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the State’s boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation, which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would contradict the principle of its existence. According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior race is exterminated, reduced to servitude, outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence.

Too many nation-states add to international complications and help to mount mutual rivalries and conflicts, resulting in a conflagration involving even the central States. Lord Curzon remarked at the Lausanne Conference that the right of self-determination is like a two-edged sword and can be admitted only with reservations. The right of self-determination fragmented many existing States immediately after World War I, redrawing the political map of Europe and giving a fillip to the struggle for freedom in subject countries in Asia and Africa. During the last four decades, it became a powerful instrument as well as an argument for liberation from their colonial masters. Today, there are 184 member-states of the United Nations.

The disintegration of Soviet Russia in 1991 brought into existence fifteen independent and sovereign states based on ethnicity, and it is the most recent connotation of the right of self-determination. But the United States of America and many other countries, including India, are against the division of multi-ethnic states in the name of the night of self-determination and minority rights. Addressing a 53-nation Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in February 1993, Morris Abraham, the United States Ambassador, explained that self-determination “should not be confused with ethnic isolationism.

But ironically, in today’s world

Self-determination has become the world cry of groups that, for ethnic or religious reasons, are bent on dividing nations.

He added that self-determination was intended for colonial people, as it meant the right to be free from imperialist power, often ruling from across an ocean. In today’s version, self-determination is often asserted against neighbors within the same territory.

The controversy boils down to this fundamental question of what defines 4 nations, and he answered that if it is common culture, a common language, and historical claims to territory, there could be thousands of nations instead of less than two hundred. The right of self-determination, in the sense of the right to break away from one’s own nation, does not necessarily attach to a group simply because its members share ethnic, religious, or cultural history, he emphasized.

However, the birth of so many sovereign states has created international disequilibrium. Most of these newly born States need to be more viable units that firmly stand on their legs to ensure political and economic poise. With their jittering political stability and precarious economic resources, they have to lean heavily on some immense power, neighboring or distant, who can come to their rescue and steer them through their predicaments.

This has two results. First, it disturbs the balance of power in the international sphere, and second, it creates an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust with the logical implication of a mad race for armaments. Every State, big or small, old or new, pursues a Vigorous policy of arming itself against any future contingency and, thus, begins the hysteria of war-preparedness.

That had been the course of history since the Treaty of Versailles; Laski has correctly said that nation-states enter into a competition in the armament of power, which acts to jeopardize the maintenance of peace, to provoke an atmosphere of nervous hostility and to induce the smaller States into an alliance with powerful neighbors that may win security by that multiplied strength. So organized, the distribution of nation-states resembles nothing so much as a powder magazine which, as in 1914, a single chance spark may suffice to provoke a conflagration.

Two other disquieting legacies of the right of self-determination are the hunger for new markets and the craze for economic self-sufficiency, especially with the newly-born States. Financial self-sufficiency is an alias for economic nationalism and has more dangerous effects than political nationalism. In the final analysis, they are the two sides of the same coin. Economic self-sufficiency suffocates the normal channels of trade and commerce, and, worst of all, is unethical restrictions on immigration and fanning of race hatred. This tug-of-war between the nation-states is another significant addition to the vicious circle of international distrust and intrigue.

Whatever the extent and substance of the criticism of the right of self-determination, it has been and still is the beau ideal of nationalities who aspire for nationhood and statehood. The urge for freedom and independence cannot be suppressed indefinitely by sheer naked force. It becomes impossible to contain it once it takes the shape of an upsurge. But a workable substitute that can lessen the ill effects of too many nations States and simultaneously solve the problems of nationalities differing in language, customs, history, and their level of cultures is the mechanism of a federal polity. It is a device to unify nationalities into a cohesive society and simultaneously provides them an opportunity to preserve their separate individuality through adequate and abiding constitutional safeguards. The enlightened public opinion is strongly veering around this point of view; some even suggest a world federation’s feasibility.